Seven months after Yash Sanghvi and Archit Sanadhya launched OLI, a YouTube channel run by the NSS division of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 2015 in Mumbai, they had only 100 subscribers.

Today, it has more than 330,000, mostly students from rural India, where quality education is still a distant dream.

It all began when Sanghvi began working with the NGO 'Vidya' as part of the NSS programme and mooted the idea of providing a digital education platform to the students who needed it the most. Accordingly, Sanghvi and Sanadhya developed a system in which students from all classes in college create educational videos, verify facts and upload them.

The first-level volunteers choose the subject and make the videos, the second-level managers check accuracy and send them back to the volunteers for uploading. The volunteers also shoot science experiments in laboratories on handycams and upload them.

They have uploaded 210 videos so far. Usually, uploading two videos a week; in December, one video a day is uploaded. The exercise is dubbed a "December bonanza", helping subscribers improve their study process before exams in March.

"The investment is minimum," says Sanadhya, "a camera and the Internet. All the videos are free. Anyone can download them."

At present, the videos are available in eight languages-Marathi, Hindi, Oriya, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati and Malayalam.

The initiative paid off when students of the Naxal-affected district of Giridih in Jharkhand responded. Their teachers told the IIT team that attendance had gone up in classes since they started using their videos to teach.

Get real-time alerts and all the news on your phone with the all-new India Today app. Download from